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Hancock County, Iowa, is one of those rural counties in the American heartland that did not support Mr. Trump in 2016. This county now supports Trump by a large margin because they see his policies benefitting rural America, and see him as a way for the Republican party to be back in power to pursue a conservative agenda. WSJ reports from Hancock County in Iowa. The American voting system gives more importance to states with smaller populations in the Electoral College relative to larger states. States with large farming communities such as Wisconsin, Michigan and Iowa play a larger role in elections in the US than population alone would suggest. John McCormick of the WSJ talks to farmers in this rural county in Iowa with a higher proportion of less educated voters than the rest of the counties in Iowa. One of five voters have a bachelors degree in Hancock County compared to one in three in Iowa as a whole and 38% nationally. The median age is 44 years compared to 39 years nationally and in Iowa. This part of rural Iowa is also in farmland that is many miles away from large cities and urban areas and more isolated and homogenous as 9 out of ten people are non-Hispanic and white. About a fourth of these voters are supporting his candidacy over Nikki Haley because they see it as more likely to win because of polls, even though Haley is according to the WSJ editorial opinion the stronger candidate for Republicans across the suburbs critical for 2024, which are slightly younger, more educated, and less isolated from the rest of the country. Biden and Obama are a sharp contrast when it comes to rural America. Where his own Agriculture secretary felt rural America was neglected by president Obama, Biden truly cares for rural America and has huge investments in rural America as part of the rural infrastructure effort. ...

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Actas or slips like receipts from every time a voter votes are generated from voting machines in Venezuela. Enough actas were collected in the Venezuela elections that show a landslide win with a 38% margin for Gonzalez over Maduro. The Maduro government has not accepted the result. It shows 7.3 million votes for Gonzalez, a former diplomat, to 3.3 million for Maduro the successor of Chavez, says the Wall Street Journal. For president Biden it was the surge in Venezuelan migrants flow and the refusal of Maduro government to take back migrants making deportation difficult, that precipitated the immigration crisis as an issue in the 2024 elections. The problem was tackled by closing the border with Biden taking executive action, after the law closing the border cleared the Senate in February but was held up in the House by Mr. Trump. Trump hoped to benefit from the Border issue to get elected in November 2024 held it up. That law was negotiated by Republicans McConnell and Lankford and Biden. Kamala Harris says the first thing she will do if elected is to pass that law. Republicans like the Tories in the UK are now seen as pandering on the issue to keep power, not keen on resolving it once and for all. As we show from the example of Mette Frederiksen in Denmark and her far sighted thinking it is possible to be good for workers and families, and tough on immigration that hurts workers by creating like foreign wars a huge and unnecessary distraction. Why for instance must workers and families live from paycheck to paycheck because of misgovernance in Asia or Africa or Arab world ,or deliberately created wars to empty countries of population as in Arab lands. Taking the issue up in the countries themselves with whatever action is needed was the right answer from the beginning, and lost on Merkel and other leaders in the US and Europe. Lessons are learned and now action must be taken. ...

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Much of the inflation reduction actions were taken by the US Federal Reserve as the central bank of the Nation and by president Biden in passing the Inflation Reduction Act and investing in growing the economy. All this may be jeopardized by the action of a Trump administration limiting the independence of the central bank. The support for crypto currency by Trump creates more risks to the economy. Additional risks are posed by the views expressed in Project 2025 on the US central bank. It is stated that the financial stability mandate be removed, that employment stability be removed and its regulatory role be effectively taken out. A commission to be appointed to look at alternatives to the central banking role of the US Fed. There are inflationary episodes and banking crises yet they stem from poor behaviour of banks as private players (2009 financial crisis) and price gouging by companies and firms and are not because of the central bank. There are also episodes of poor management  which reflected the culture of that period such as Libertarian culture under Greenspan. As in management in private industry firms good or poor managers make adifference. The institution created of the central bank around 1910 comes from the crises that happened in the period before that  and how it evolved into its postwar role. This includes the Great Depression when it did not have its regulatory, financial stability and employment role. Tampering with the basic structure that has evolved over 100 years of experience would cause lasting damage to the US economy and expose it to hidden risks. This would put a severe burden on the Nation after the loss of one million lives in the pandemic that just happened, the cost of living crisis, and the severe impact that decades of loss of local manufacturing have placed on communities across America- which both the US Federal Reserve under Jerome Powell and president Biden have fought so hard to tackle. ...

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In this interview with Herndon of the NYT Bernie Sanders refutes the labels "progressive" or "left" and says it is simply about policy that benefits the workers and families that make up the vast majority of this Nation. Sanders says 60% of workers are living from paycheck to paycheck. The vast majority of people 60-70% support Medicare for All, improvements in Social Security, cutting pharmaceutical costs, and tution support to make higher education accessible to all. Why he asks do workers support Trump? He says it is because the truth is that the Democratic party has abandoned its roots. He does not go into this, yet it can be said that the rise of the Tech industry in the last two decades has led to tech billionaires and business people coopting the Democratic party for their agenda. In the last year of the Obama administration it was evident that Rural America and people who represent rural America such as Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack of Iowa felt ignored while Obama spent more time with tech and internet business people. Former president Trump simply stepped into this void as Democrats failed to turn up for rural America. President Biden has turned things around by making Tom Vilsack an important part of his administrations with the president listening to  him and others speaking for rural America. The passion with which Senator Pat Schumer talked recently on CBS Face the Nation about bringing broadband to rural America shows how Biden and Harris, Harris and Walz see Rural America. This Democratic ticket is fighting for Rural America every step of the way to bring hope and a better life to Rural America. Sanders reminds people of FDR in 1936 after four years of fighting the Depression and improving lives there was so much that needed to be done. It is the same today and Sanders is wading into this fight with Harris and Walz in the same way as FDR did in 1936. ...

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Potential Treasury nominee Kevin Warsh is given the possible role at Treasury plus appointment as Fed chairman after 2026 when Jerome Powell retires. At 35 years Kevin Warsh was the youngest governor of the Federal Reserve, America's central bank, appointed in 2006 by George Bush. At the time his appointment was criticized for lack of experience- Warsh comes from upstate New York and went to school at Shaker School in Latham, then Stanford, in economics and a JD at Harvard, followed by 7 years at Morgan Stanley. He was executive secretary of the National Economic Council in 2002. During the bank financial crisis of 2009 the lack of macro regulation led to failure of investment banks. Warsh was able top save Morgan Stanley and he acted as an avenue of information from banks to the Fed.

Warsh left the Fed in 2011 and returned to public service in 2016 when Trump made his first run for president as an adviser to DJT. 

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Jim Tankersley of the Washington Post looks at the myths and realities of trade following incorrect statements made by Donald Trump about international trade. For example Trump suggests that Japanese automobiles imports are a big problem, though the imports have been cut by over 50% since the 1980's with Japanese companies Toyota and Honda making cars in the U.S. in Kentucky and Ohio. Detroit faces competition from foreign manufacturers based in southern states, including Alabama for Mercedes Benz and Tennessee for Nissan. Mismanagement including lagging in fuel efficiency and quality, and higher health costs for older workers were problems facing Detroit in the past decade. The Obama administration provided support to the auto companies to make the recovery following two bankruptcies in the U.S. auto industry, showing the U.S. has intervened as needed and the auto companies have made transformational changes. A big problem says Trump is the trade agreement with China which he promises to renegotiate. Tankersley points out that no such treaty exists. The U.S. agreed to China's entry into the WTO. This is not something the U.S. can renegotiate as the WTO sets rules for trade for all countries. The likely result of a shift away from Chinese imports would be more imports from countries such as India and Vietnam which are lower cost producers than China. Trump says some of the 2 million jobs lost in the past 2 decades will come back, yet the shift may be towards lower cost countries from China, with fewer jobs coming back to the U.S. High tariffs would not lead to the growth Trump predicts. A study made by Moody's Analytics at the request of the WP shows a Trump move for high tariffs would lead to a recession and lead to mass layoffs as other countries imposed their own tariffs, leading to large loss in U.S. exports. Trump has made claims such as telling the Post that $19 trillion in federal debt could be paid off in 8 years without raising taxes by fixing trade. No grounding on facts is provided by Trump. One of the failures of the media in the 2016 election campaign is the failure of the media to provide scrutiny for candidates claims and wild exaggerations, which have gone uncontested or unquestioned, or without the persistence till satisfactory answers are given by the candidates making them. Especially when the stakes are so high, for the U.S. and for the global economy. ...

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Levelling up is proving to be a false promise of the Conservatives. Where the money is coming from and how much and where it is going answers the question in America for Biden. Fair taxation is key, a strong economy is key for Biden. Fair taxation supports trillions in public investment that in turn generate private investment. In the second quarter of 2023 business investment was up 56% in Biden America, about $1 trillion with more in the pipeline.  The Conservatives fail on both and have no plan for step by step action that fits needs and opportunities in the economy as Biden has. Getting equal share of the fruits of labour to all Britons is never going to happen under trickle down economics of the Trump or Tory kind. That much is clear as daylight.

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The Chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and Deputy Chair, Nanette Baragan, Adriano Espaillat ,say "we stand with president Joe Biden and vice president Kamala Harris." There are 43 members in that group. Biden also had a good conversation Monday night with 60 members of the CBC Congressional Black Caucus. The CBC offered full support to Biden and Harris and the CBC called for efforts to invest in housing and invest in the Black Community. Every member of CBC praised Biden. Senator Patty Murray, president pro tempore of the Senate, asked Biden to be more forceful and energetic- "There is such a case to be prosecuted against Trump, president Biden has to lead the charge making that case." She also praised Biden for leading a "historic" first term.

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Buffeted by the North Sea and winds in the Scottish isles of the Outer Hebrides, one finds what BBC Newsnight's Stephen Smith calls "a formidable Calvinism" that is the maternal roots of what looks like a bit wild Donald J Trump. DJT's mother Mary Ann MacLeod visited the Hebrides isle of Lewis, was well respected in the community and spoke Gaelic. Even though DJT did not visit frequently he encouraged Stephen Smith to look at his maternal roots. DJT's grandfather was a fisherman and his great grandfather lost his life fishing in the North Sea. One can imagine something of Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea in this story from the 1800's, and trace the resilience of DJT back to that period.

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The Air Force Secretary during the Biden administration Frank Kendall thinks using a donated Qatari jet as Ai Force One is a bad idea.

“It is basically going to take that airplane as is with the modest modifications achievable in a few months. He is getting something far less than Air Force One and the country is only going to get it for two years’ time. He can do it, but it is a bad idea for a lot of reasons.”

Others think it can never be made fully secure.

Boeing has taken too long to build a new Air Force One to replace current one built in 1990. The new contract given to Boeing during the last Trump administration is years behind schedule leaving the president frustrated.

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Kessler and Lee do the fact check in the Washington Post on Hillary Clinton's comment in the third Democratic U.S. presidential debate in Dec. 2015. Clinton says "Donald Trump is becoming ISIS's best recruiter. They are going to people showing videos of Donald Trump insulting Islam and Muslims in order to recruit more radical jihadists." This was an effort by Clinton to distinguish her approach to terrorism from that of Trump. Kessler and Lee say Clinton referred to videos of ISIS that so far cannot be found. The closest to this is an NBC news report citing Rita Katz of the SITE Intelligence Group monitoring Islamic terrorist groups that Trump's comment on barring entry of Muslims to the U.S. could be used as a recruiting tool. The Clinton campign says Hillary was referring to this.

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The CEO of the New York Times and the former director general of the BBC, takes a look at the public discourse in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and in the Brexit campaign, and finds some troubling changes. The use of words that can eaily be picked up by Twitter and social media to attack opponents, the complete disregard for facts, and outright attempts to denigrate and destroy using rhetorical tactics, and a section of the public that has turned away from the facts or is disinterested in facts, is deeply troubling for Mark Thompson. When the public discourse fails, then the politics as a whole starts to collapse, says Thompson. We are children of the enlightenment, says Thompson, and were taught to look underneath statements to discern the truth. This is a crisis in public discourse. Worse it is one in which truth telling by people who say they are outsiders and tell it like it is, is not about telling the truth. Which is what makes it so dangerous. Thompson cites the statement by Michael Gove that "people in this country have had enough of experts," as another dangerous sign. He says it is time that experts make themselves understandable and talk in a way the public can understand. The media needs to explain issues in clear ways, and professional policymakers language of discourse needs to be conveyed in better ways that the public can grasp, in which the Brexit Remain campaign failed, says Thompson. Its important to acknowledge the problem, as the health of our democracies depends on finding solutions to what has happened in 2015-2016 to change the public discourse and let it deteriorate to unimaginable levels.  ...

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Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is pushing for a large pandemic stimulus package to ensure the recovery of ordinary Americans after suffering through this pandemic. Yellensays: "We need to make sure that people aren't going hungry in America, that they can put food on the table, that they're not losing their homes and ending up out on the street because of evictions. We really need to address those forms of suffering, and I think we should'nt compromise on it." Mr. Biden has a $1.9 trillion stimulus package for the pandemic related recovery to relieve suffering people and businesses. Yellen and Biden feel it is really important to do this immediately. A recent picture in the NYT shows Stephen Schwarzmann of American finance with Mr. Trump showing him as one who stuck with Mr. Trump to the end. Much of this play as Shakespeare calls it, is the result of Democrats of the old tradition like Yellen trained by economists from the New Deal and Johnson era, who have not walked the talk and forgotten the suffering of American workers. Yellen held a Conference on Equality at a branch of the Federal Reserve during her time at the Fed, used strong language about the neglect of American workers but did little under the Clinton or Obama administration about the underlying structures of tech and shift of American jobs overseas that led to the destruction of America's manufacturing. Today they are faced with the picture of food insecurity in American homes once a situation that afflicted China and India. ...

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BBC environmental correspondent points out that the climate change executive order from U.S. president Trump reversing Obama's clean energy policies is designed to change the narrative to job creation. This follows approval for building the Keystone pipeline from Canada to bring oil from oil sands production to the U.S. The pipeline was also presented as a job creation effort. Environmental groups oppose the president's action. Court action and challenges are seen as helping Republican policy of delaying implementation of Clean Power Plan policy setup to control carbon dioxide emissions under the Obama administration. 

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The sixth Republican presidential debate in Jan. 2016 showed the main exchanges between Trump and Cruz, with some points made by Christie. The rest of the candidates Rubio, Kasich, Bush, Carson, made little headway. As Dan Balz points out in the Washington Post the Republican primaries look like a contest between Cruz and Trump, both anti-establishment candidates, both tapping into grass roots anger at the Obama administration and at establishment Republicans.

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Senators in the US Congress, Rubio and Schumer, have asked the US government to look into Apple's plans to work with Chinese semiconductor company YMTC. As a result the Commerce Department has placed export restrictions on YMTC. This NYT report looks at the two decade long rise of China and of Apple after Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 and shifted manufacturing to China. When Jobs returned to Apple he found major quality issues at Apple's manufacturing facilities, a demoralized workforce, and financial losses, with CEO Michael Spindler running the company into the ground. Jobs had to start with afresh model for Apple and decided to shift manufacturing to China under the engineering leadership of Tim Cook. Alabama native Cook went to Auburn University for his engineering degree and Duke for his business degree. Cook joined Jobs in 1998 at Apple and for ten years till 2007 the two cut costs, shifted to contract manufacturers and rebuilt Apple with new products, iPod, iPad and the iphone. By not manufacturing Apple avoided quality control issues, and the costs of maintaining inventory. It was Tim Cook who ran operations worldwide, and he gradually built up the manufacturing relationships in China with Foxconn, which makes most of Apple's products in sprawling Chinese factories that employ 20 years later about 3 million Chinese workers. Foxconn was chosen by Apple in 2000 to manufacture the Apple Mac laptop. Before that it was a parts supplier to Apple. Increasingly Apple relied on Foxconn to make its new products including the iPhone. Both companies growth relied on the manufacturing of Foxconn to the point where Apple was dependent on Foxconn and had intertwined its operations with Foxconn in China. Today the whole relationship is being called into question after two decades in which American workers suffered the effects of the outshoring of manufacturing jobs. It should be noted that though Mr. Trump raised the issue of manufacturing exclusively in China with Apple, the Trump administration did little to change the practices of the company that pioneered this type of massive manufacturing role for China. That surrendered the entire supply chain to foreign suppliers in the interest of cutting costs and maintaining huge profit margins, with which it financed an array of new products and reached $1 trillion in sales from $10 billion, hundredfold increase over 2 decades. American workers and families for the first time in American history got very little from this Cook-Jobs project. American infrastructure in communities that would have been supported by American factories including the services and infrastructure in communities financed through local taxes, a practice throughout the Industrial Revolution in the US, was sharply disrupted over 2 decades. It caused a rupture in social relations and increased inequality in the US, and defunded infrastructure that comes with manufacturing.  It is the task of the Biden administration to now correct what Mr. Trump simply talked about but never induced or required Apple to do- lead the resurgence of American manufacturing, and make its major investments in the US, invest in its workers and families, invest in America. ...

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Indian foreign minister Jaishankar describes the highly eccentric situation of lack of US India close economic and defense cooperation for over 50 years, when the natural flow of cooperation one would expect between the land of Washington and Lincoln and the land of Vivekananda and Gandhi was interrupted. The current form of cooperation has existed for about 14 years and accelerated after prime minister Modi was elected in 2016. This was a turning point in the US India relationship and in India US economic partnership. After president Trump was elected Mr. Modi and Mr. Trump held a huge public gathering in stadiums at Houston and Ahmedabad, in a way that was never seen before between an Asian country and America. What changed? For one thing India had a great weight lifted from its shoulders with the removal of the erratic Nehru policies of post independence India of forming a non aligned bloc with countries like Egypt and Yugoslavia. These were policies that had no connection to India and its history as the civilization where the East has its roots in Vedanta and Buddhism. It also resulted in alienating the Dwight Eisenhower administration and administrations that followed after John F. Kennedy, as the Cold War intensified and most of Eastern Europe came under Soviet domination. India never gauged the effect this had on America after the Berlin crisis in 1948, the Hungarian revolution of 1956 and similar uprisings in East Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic. Britain was no help even with the British Commonwealth, as the British perpetuated the idea that India was too divided to make up one country, having failed to grasp India's ancient civilization and  culture, and having built the Empire in India by using the division in the country. Mohandas Gandhi described this in Hind Swaraj in 1910 and told Indians that it was they who had invited the British into India, with rulers using military garrisons of the British commercial East India Company for help in their internal wars. Americans still unfamiliar with India till after 2000 simply accepted British colonial ideas about India. The new administrations in the US, the Trump and Biden administration, and the Modi administration in India have shaken this up and changed perceptions all around. Biden recently during the Modi visit to Washington DC said India US relations as he sees it would be "the closest on earth." So that today we have an ancient civilization roused to its depths in its youth for modernization, that extends from India to Indonesia all the way to Japan rooted in India's ancient civilization of Vedanta and Buddhism, with a population of about 2 billion people. That faces the US on its Pacific coast, united in its determination to build a new and common future with ideas of parliamentary democracy, participation of the people, and of modernization with science and technology, contributing to the betterment of all peoples. ...

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Kushner, U.S. president Trump's son-in-law, loses his security clearance and is not seen in a favorable light in the media after his contacts with foreign governments were seen as benefiting his business interests. This editorial in NYT is critical of appointing family relatives to senior positions in any administration.

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The Putin Trump meeting in July 2018 creates a storm in the U.S. over denials by the Russian president and the U.S. president about any interference by Russia in the 2018 U.S. presidential election. As the New York Times reports all intelligence groups in the U.S. have confirmed the interference. The images of the two presidents saying this just as the Mueller investigation gathers evidence is one more unusual event in 2017-2018, with what was once seen as improbable taking place.

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As corporate America takes stock of the damage it finds on April 12, 2020-

270 companies have draw on existing credit lines or added ones for a total $221 billon in new debt.

100 companies furloughing 3 million employees.

Unemployment insurance claims filed by 17 million people.

Airlines, retail and automobiles some of the worst hit industries.

President Trump acted quickly on April 11, to save the oil and gas industry by negotiating cuts with OPEC+ so that oil prices do not collapse at the opening of markets on April 13 from the price of $22  barrel. He also pledged to save Boeing.

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President Trump plans to sign the trade deal with China for Phase 1 on January 15, 2020. Under the deal the U.S. will not go ahead with a new round of tariffs on $156 billion of Chinese goods- including smartphones and consumer electronics- set for December 15, 2019. Tariffs set in place on September 1 on $120 billion of Chinese goods will drop from 15% to 7.5%. The earlier tariffs in place on $250 billion in Chinese goods including machinery and electronics are still in place. In exchange the Chinese will increase purchases by $32 billion in U.S. agricultural goods over the previous levels in the next 2 years.